Take a look at my website featuring my thesis, photography and digital media work!

tinyurl.com/RobinCone-MurakamiStudio

Reflection

This first semester of Thesis I feel that I have really grown as an artist and pushed myself to go beyond  photography even though I'm a photographer. Expanding into instillation work was a big step in my maturation as an artist and has led me to new questions, inspirations and a broader range of creativity and imagination about what my art can become. This semester has given me lots of opportunities to  practice talking about my work and I feel that the practice has really paid off. My work is very personal and it can be difficult to discuss my work professionally without getting too emotional; however, I feel that it is getting easier and smoother and that I am able to find a way to talk that is both professional and heartfelt.

I submitted a series of my thesis images to the Creative Quarterly Journal of Art and Design where one of my portfolio images was accepted into their online gallery last school year. I also submitted photographs to the Photographer's Forum Magazine. I should be notified sometime in January if any of my images have been accepted.

As for current influences, Crystal Schenk's "Artifacts of Memory" (2012) is very influential in my instillation work, specifically the quiet and subtle yet powerful way she uses her materials to create tension, apprehension and meditation. I am working through similar concepts within my own grief that she mentioned in her artist statement about her mother's passing and feelings of detachment and longing when memories begin the fade. Although her work is about a very serious and painful subject, her work does not intimidate viewers and invites them in to participate...Quite recently, I've been introduced to a few other artists like Shinichi Maruyama and student artists Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi who have recently produced work with nudes and the human figure. Here are links to see some of their work:

http://www.shinichimaruyama.com/

http://www.m-kagaku.co.jp/mcjda/award2013/awd01_det04.html

This semester I challenged myself to create something three dimensional because I wanted my viewers to be immersed in my pieces. Creating a piece large enough for someone to walk through has been long and arduous but I am still very excited for the end product. It was tricky to figure out that I yearned for something more immediate in the mean time, which is why I went back to viewing my photos as works in themselves at the same time while I was creating my instillation piece. Challenging myself to explore beyond photography on paper has opened new doors in my mind and I will continue to explore the possibilities of gel transfers, layering of images, and stitching.

I am excited to have the time this winter break to continue to explore and develop my artwork in Hawaii. It seems as if there are not as many art opportunities in Hawaii to show and submit work as there is on the mainland, so I am challenging myself to really investigate and learn more about the art community in Hawaii to prepare myself for after gradation. I've got lots of emotional inspiration and new ideas from critiques to explore so I am ready to keep going and make more art!

As my fall semester of thesis comes to an end, I've been reflecting upon the maturation of my work and myself as an artist. I really enjoy hearing how people perceive and experience my work...it naturally influences the development of my work in a very organic way in which my own ideas are engaged in a continuous dialogue with my viewers.

...subtle, simplicity, beautiful, haunting, fragile sensation, sacred, trance, delicate, rawness, therapeutic, intricate, calming, quiet...these are words from critiques about my work that especially stuck with me and have even helped to shape my own feelings about my work. My artistic process and ideas are very organic and is always transforming as I create, discuss and listen. One of my viewers wrote in a critique, "Robin presents a body of work that can be perceived in many ways and entices the viewer to engage the imagery where they might find their own dialogue with the work." When I receive a comment like this, I feel that my efforts are especially successful because it's an affirmation that my work is relatable to others. It means that others are able to engage in my artwork in a way that is meaningful. My artwork is not just about me. It's about all of us and our common experience of being human and living...and dying. What does that mean? I don't know exactly, but I know that I love the people in my life and that it hurts when they are gone. I know that the world extends beyond just me and that we all must go through these things. I also know that to be alive is wonderful, or at least has the potential to be wonderful. I know that I will never truly find the answers to my pain and my joy. My artwork is a way to communicate with others, in a way without words about things that no words would ever truly do justice towards.

The week before Thanksgiving break, I produced some large prints of my thesis images. Creating large scale instillation pieces takes time so I found myself yearning for something more immediate, so I went back to my images as artworks in themselves. Here are a few examples

Getting another batch of "skin" ready...got to wait until tomorrow for them to dry before I can start stitching.

Getting to work on my next few pieces...I'm trying to produce my material in bulk so that I have lots to work with in the upcoming week. I'm contemplating on the size of my new pieces and also incorporating the concept of projecting one or two of my abstract portraits onto my instillation pieces!

Open Studio Week

A couple weeks ago I converted my studio into an open gallery space for my thesis work. This provided an opportunity for viewers to see my work in a more professional setting and prompted me to think about how I would want my pieces displayed. I had the wonderful opportunity to have a studio visit with the well known New York based photographer Suzanne Opton who received the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her soldier series is currently showing at the Linfield College gallery... It was refreshing to get a critique from another photographer and she seemed genuinely intrigued and interested in my thesis work. Opton is an experienced portrait photographer so our common interest in photographing people gave us common ground on which to discuss our inspirations. She enjoyed my purely photographic pieces and pointed out something significant that had not occurred to me. My pictures are abstract portraits of the human body and she pointed out that most of the time when people look at such things, the art becomes a guessing game in which they try to figure out what part of the body is photographed. Opton said that is all very boring for her and my pieces that are most successful are the ones that allow the viewer to go past that guessing game and thus enables the pictures to just be seen as artworks in themselves, in their line, shadow, color and form. As the photographer, I know what parts of the body are being photographed and thus I am not concerned with the fact of what I am photographing, but instead, am simply entranced by the form, line and color that is created. To me, they are not simply photographs of the human body, but become something entirely of its own. I'm grateful to Opton for making this comment that reminded me of the difference between how I see my work and how my work is perceived by others.

In respect to my instillation piece, she commended me in broadening my horizons and branching out into mixed media as another way for my photography to manifest itself; however, she gently cautioned not to get too caught up in making it complicated. She enjoyed the simplicity of my concept of floating skin and said that the concept itself was enough for her.

This week I photographed my studio with the lighting system in an attempt to document my work more professionally. I'm discovering that instillation pieces are much more difficult to document well. With photographs, they are already documented in their original medium ha-ha, so I guess even expanding into different media is helping me to become a better photographer!

Updated Artist Statement

November 3, 2013

My abstract portraits of the human body become a process of healing, through which I am entranced by the distinct lines and shadows and creases and folds and the sensuality and life that they evoke. The emotional substance of the portraits become the heart of the work itself, expressed though its blend of colors and shadows, blurring the lines between what is known and what is not. My design process is an exploration of the ephemeral effects stitching has on my compositions, portraying the complex, delicate and sometimes invisible connections that hold our personal relationships together. Conveying a celebration of life and combining the papery thin fragility of its stature, my pieces mediate between concepts of life and death, the beautiful and grotesque and the mystery that lies behind the relationship between my pain at the loss of people I love and my celebration of living and those who have lived.

More progress on my current piece...using it as an experimental model for a potentially much larger, taller and complicated instillation piece...

Edited Artist Statement

October 9, 2013

Death is nothing new to me. After I lost my uncle last year to cancer, I was plunged back into the dark abyss of what it meant to lose someone you love, something so essential and vital in your life that you're lost and have got to find a new way of living. Memories of losing my father to cancer as a child flew back and opened up old woulds and new questions about my humanity and the connection that I had with my loved ones who were gone. I have found myself time and again in an emotional fragile state in a cruel game of "believe it or not," pulled back and forth between being told my loved ones are dying and that they are not.

My abstract portraits of the human body became a process of healing, through which I became entranced by the distinct lines and shadows and creases and folds and the sensuality and life that they evoked. The emotional substance of the portraits become the heart of the work itself, expressed through its blend of colors and shadows, blurring the lines between what is known and what is not. My design process is an exploration of the ephemeral effects stitching has on my compositions, portraying the complex, delicate and sometimes invisible connections that hold our personal relationships together. Conveying a celebration of life and combining the papery thin fragility of its stature, my pieces transcend between concepts of life and death, the beautiful and grotesque and the mystery that lies behind the relationship between my pain at the loss of people I love and my celebration of living and those who have lived.

Here is a video of my three-dimensional piece so far...

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working exclusively with the matte gel and I am really happy with the results. The rough texture and crinkly surface of the material provides beauty and ugliness at the same time. It provides a sense of volume that the luster gel's smooth surface lacks...Since my last posts, I have explored two different forms of presentation other than the pedestal. I created a collage of larger prints sewn together which I tacked to the wall and am in the process of creating a three-dimensional piece by using clear fishing line to hang my smaller compositions from above to create the illusion that they are floating. I have inspiration to make this into a much larger instillation but am still debating about the details...a curtain effect? something you can walk through? be surrounded by?

I woke up to a surprise this morning! The matte gel dried with a funky wrinkly dry leathery feel, a much more textured surface than my last two pieces using the luster gel. The material is much less reflective which I think adds more to the illusion of skin...I tried out different stitching techniques and less structured patterns and added a different color of thread too...

I'm enjoying where this process is going and it seems to develop farther the more time I spend with it.

Took some self-portraits this past weekend for new material to work with and tonight I worked on the gel transfers for the compositions I picked out. These portraits have a lighter color pallet than my last two works...am trying out matte finish instead of luster so see if it enhances the skin-like quality of the pieces. Interestingly, the matte acrylic gel made the compositions expand when wetted; I'll see if they shrink back to normal size tomorrow. I'm still contemplating on whether I like the larger or smaller compositions....so many questions when you start something new!

Here are a few pictures demonstrating the gel transfer process of my pieces. After my coated photographs are dry I must soak them and carefully take off the paper on the back side so that the gel is all that is left. I am exploring the possibilities of size and how it may influence the intimacy and overall aesthetics of the pieces.